What is hibernation? When do bears and other animals go to sleep?

Nature uses many mechanisms to protect plants and animals from the harmful effects of external factors and hazards. Speed, strength, sharp teeth, poison are all active means of survival. Masking, symbiosis and anabiosis are passive methods that help to survive. The article will tell about the hibernation of the bears, will answer questions about how the clubfooters prepare for winter when the bears go to sleep when they wake up.

What is hibernation

Hibernation is the time of deceleration of life processes and chemical metabolism in the body of warm-blooded animals. The main characteristics of this condition: a decrease in body temperature by several degrees, breathing becomes rare, slowing of the heartbeat, inhibition of physiological processes. Hibernation is used by animals for self-preservation in periods when it is difficult to find food, when severe colds come. The condition can last from several days to many months.

What animals can fall into hibernation

Since childhood, everyone knows that in the winter, the bear-faced bear falls into a hibernation, during which it sucks its paw, but wakes up only in the spring. And the answer to the question of when bears go into hibernation is known even to children - late autumn.

In fact, bears do not fall into a real hibernation, which is in fact an anabiosis of the body. They just plunge into a shallow sleep, easily waking up if they are disturbed. During this sleep, the body temperature of bears is reduced to 31 ° C, while the normal temperature of the beast is approximately 38 ° C. For comparison: the body temperature of the American ground squirrel, which in the active state is 38 ° C, drops to zero during the hibernation! After all, Toptygin's organism works in economy mode, the number of heart beats drops to ten per minute, metabolic processes slow down several times.

But in a dream, the bear turns over to the other side, sometimes lifts its head. At the same time, there are many animals in nature who experience unfavorable conditions, going into a state of deep sleep resembling death: hedgehogs, Madagascar dwarf lemur, gophers, jerboa, bats.

As a bear, the gooey is preparing for hibernation. Accumulation of fat

In order to successfully overwinter, two questions need to be solved:

• Accumulate energy reserves;
• To prepare for the wintering room - the den.

Energy reserves are fat. To accumulate it, the bear is in the active search for food all summer. He loves sweet forest berries, especially raspberries and strawberries, honey of wild bees, but in food is uncomfortable and eats roots, ants, fish, small mammals. The underbearing layer of fat in bears is closer to the cold to a thickness of 7-9 cm. Females gain weight up to 150 kg and more, males - up to 300 kg, with 1/3 of the total mass accounted for by fat.

A few days before going to winter, they stop eating and actively empty the intestines. After all, when the bears go to sleep, they do not feed for half a year, do not drink water and do not defecate.

Preparation of the lair for wintering

The second thing is to prepare a shelter - warm enough that it could hide from frost, and safe, so as not to become easy prey for the enemy.

A place for the future den, the bear chooses very carefully. Depending on the species, this may be a depression between the tree roots, a cave or a rock niche, an abandoned anthill, a hollow of a tree. Sometimes bears dig dugouts, reinforcing the walls with boughs, very rarely build the upper lairs - a structure of branches on the ground, resembling a large bird's nest.

The bottom of the shelter is covered with spruce branches, peat, moss, dry leaves, hay, and when the bears go to sleep, they are warm and cozy in their beds.

Dimensions of the den are not much greater than the body of the beast. Toptygin always leaves a hole through which air enters his shelter. Surprisingly, the snow, completely falling asleep to the lair, never falls asleep "window", so successfully the bear knows how to choose a place for him.

In which month does the bear go to sleep

Scientists have long been closely studying the natural phenomenon of winter hibernation. Much attention is paid to physiological processes, such as metabolism and changes in metabolic reactions. Also, scientists are interested in when bears go to sleep. In Siberia and in Europe this happens at different times. Such factors are important:

• Sex, age and physiological condition of the animal;
• Yield of bear feed;
• Natural area;
• weather.

The first in the beginning of November, pregnant females and mothers with cubs leave for the winter. Yalovye mare and males go to bed at the end of November, and in the southern regions they can hold out until the middle of December.

In years with a particularly large harvest of nuts, acorns, these terms are shifted by a few weeks closer to winter.

If the bear, for some reason, did not manage to get fat for winter or arrange a dwelling, then it does not fall into a hibernation. Such animals are called rods. They are very dangerous, because they behave aggressively and spitefully.

Now the reader knows at what time the bear lies in hibernation and how he prepares for it. It remains to be clarified that Toptygin comes out of the den in the south at the end of February, in the middle latitudes - in March, in the north - in April. Thus, wintering can last from 2.5 to 6 months.